Originally Posted by
rydabent
Your point is spot on. I have posted many times that even tho the anti helmet types have never had an accident, it is no proof that they never will.
As I told my customers, there are two types of computer hard drives-----those that have crashed, and those that will.
For some hard drives, or consumer hard drives operating 24/7 in servers. I used to look at the customer's use case, consider the annual failure rate and mean time before failure as much as was known then, and recommend hard drives that would likely perform without failure for the expected life cycle. I have a box full of hard drives that I've outgrown, that never crashed.
Just like helmets and injuries - it all depends on the probability of failure and how necessary precautions are. Anyone with any sense would back up their mission-critical data, but Raid-5 with network mirroring would be silly for your "my documents" folder on your desktop.